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UrbanRemix: Middletown

A project in collaboration with Wesleyan University to engage the university and broader Middletown community in discovering, sharing, and repurposing the sounds around them. The project ran from 2012-2013,culminating in a festival in May 2013 featuring performances, installations, and other events drawing from the sounds collected by the Middletown community over the course of the past year. More information at http://www.middletownpress.com/general-news/20130329/middletown-remix-to-culminate-in-sound-festival-2.

UrbanRemix is a collaborative and locative sound project. Our goal in developing UrbanRemix was to design a platform and series of public workshops that would enable participants to develop and express the acoustic identity of their communities, and enable users of the website to explore and experience the soundscapes of the city in a novel fashion.

The UrbanRemix platform consists of a mobile phone system and web interface for recording, browsing, and mixing audio. It allows users to document and explore the obvious, neglected, private or public, even secret sounds of the urban environment. Participants in the UrbanRemix workshops become active creators of shared soundscapes as they search the city for interesting sound cues. The collected sounds, voices, and noises provide the original tracks for musical remixes that reflect the specific nature and acoustic identity of the community.

The project draws upon long-standing aesthetic practices that bring real-world sounds into electronic works, such as musique concréte, acoustic ecology, and the chance approaches of John Cage, as well as practices in public art and relational aesthetics that structure new forms of engagement and collaboration between artists, designers and citizens. Its innovative contribution is in the combination of these aesthetic approaches with current technological trends in location-aware mobile applications and in digital performance and interactive art.

The project was conceived of and is directed by Jason Freeman, Michael Nitsche, and Carl Disalvo, who are professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, Georgia. It is made possible by the invaluable work of numerous students and designers, and supported in part by the Music Technology program, the Digital Media program, and the GVU center at Georgia Tech.

From 2009-2013, the UrbanRemix project mounted events in collaboration with the Atlanta Beltline "Art on the Beltline" project, the City Centered festival and Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, the Atlanta Public Schools and Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, and the Times Square Arts Alliance in New York, among others. The UrbanRemix platform was retired in 2014.

Project web site: http://urbanremix.gatech.edu

Explanatory video: http://vimeo.com/18934954

Jason Freeman: http://www.jasonfreeman.net

Michael Nitsche: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~cdisalvo3/

Carl DiSalvo: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~nitsche/

Project Team:

Carl DiSalvo

Jason Freeman

Michael Nitsche

Matt Gilbert

David Jimison

Anirudh Venkataramanan

Harikrishna Narayanan

Stephanie Yang

Andrew Roberts

Meghashyam Adoni

Stephen Garrett

Gilberto Gaxiola

Akito Van Troyer

Trishul Mallikarjuna

Andrew Beck

Aaron Albin

Thomas Barnwell

Andrew Colella

Samuel Defilipp

Oliver Jan

Vamsi Mynampati

Ryan Nikolaidis

Avinash Sastry

Sertan Senturk

Jenifer Vandagriff

Andrew Willingham

supported by

Turner Broadcasting

GVU Center at Georgia Tech

Intel Foundation

Georgia Tech Foundation

Google

UrbanRemix sounds and images are licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/). Please reference the Urban Remix web site (http://urbanremix.gatech.edu) in any works which incorporate content from this site.